I grew up in the 1980s. It was a confusing, chaotic childhood, filled with pointless machismo and homophobia, but also a bizarre jingoistic pride in White Australia and its policies and outcomes. Like thousands of other Aussie kids, in 1988 we celebrated the Bicentennial, and even went to Brisbane for Expo '88, where we were treated to a sanitised, bleached version of our own history. I had a whole booklet on Captain Cook and his 'amazing' voyages, and all the lands he 'discovered', which weirdly enough, already had people quite happily living their own lives before they were discovered.

My first ancestor sailed from Cornwall to Australia in 1825, landing in Sydney less than fifty years after the first convicts had been marooned and nearly lost completely. It was a wild, extreme land compared to the mild and largely peaceful southwest of Great Britain. Sydney wasnt meant to be a city, but it fast became a grubby, sprawling mess of a place, a tradition it still largely clings to. Sydney is a sandstone city, the pale yellow is everywhere, sun bleached like so many of those snotty little kids growing up in Bondi and the mythical East of the City where the rich people live.

We never learned about First Nations, other than the myth that we cleared and settled huge areas. A friend at school was proud that his ancestors had been giving out poxed blankets that wiped out large groups of Aboriginals in Melbourne's West.

Individually, I don't feel guilt. I feel horror and despair at what was perpetrated not in my name, not by my ancestors, not by 'my' people, but done to Australians, by people who werent yet Australian. I don't know the tribes, the groups, the moeties, the clans, because we erased and butchered them, in gullies and courtrooms, and we destroyed their way of life such that they lost their own identity for a long, long time.

I now live on other lands taken from their original owners by deceit, and malice, and greed. There's some overlap between the Pawnee, Lakota, Otoe, and some other groups that had followed the buffalo or the Missouri, who had camped Salt Creek, who had wandered vast plains. It would've been close to Dances With Wolves cinematically, and the tribes that were here werent even the first, they were just the next in a long succession of people passing through. This is still flyover country, where people pass through going from somewhere to somewhere else, whether it's by 727, a Conestoga wagon, or a simple travois. The plains swallow everything, and will continue to do so, and the corn, the soy, the ranches and the pig farms will one day give way to bluestem and switchgrass again.